Arica or bust.

I will be getting on a bus in seven hours to take me to the Santiago Airport (it will be my seventh time there in 2010!). The plane will take me to Arica, a port city at the northern extreme of the country which was part of Peru until the War of the Pacific. Arica is known as the city of endless spring and I plan to spend the afternoon on the beach, getting into the vacation mode. Not that things have been particularly stressful or busy or non-vacation-like here in Santiago lately. But the weather has been pretty autumnal in the last week, so it will be nice to be back in the warmth. I am considering naming the volume of my memoirs that covers this year and a half period, Actually 500 Days of Summer.

After Arica I will take 18 hours of buses to Cuzco. People say it's a beautiful town and it's the jumping off point for Machu Pichu treks. I will probably be taking the faster, cheaper train option rather than the famed Inca Trail, but I'll consider the options once I'm there. After that I have 1675.33 miles to travel before the 19th when I meet my sister in Buenos Aires. I hoping to see as much of Bolivia as possible. The country's transportation is notoriously bad, so I'm sure that it will be extremely frustrating and uncomfortable at times. Which is great for you guys because frustration and discomfort mixed with loneliness is the recipe for great blogs! I jest, I jest.

I am honestly a bit nervous about being on my own for so long. At the same time, it's really exciting. The experience of living in Chile has been a pretty solitary one. Starting out not knowing many people and speaking almost no Spanish was a pretty significant hurdle to forming meaningful relationships. And while I still feel like I have a ways to go in that regard, my social life has definitely filled out over the last several months. There are many people I'll be sorry to leave. I am hoping to meet many more fellow travelers on the road.

I expect to be extremely glad for my sister's company by the final leg of the trip in Buenos Aires and Mendoza. Originally we were hoping she could come for longer, but the logistics are tough and it was all quite last minute. I am leaving my computer by taking two real books, an audiobook and a very empty journal to pass the time. I'll be in touch soon!

All you ever brought me was heartache and traffic.

Ruminations on the Bolt Bus

As I type these words a young man is nodding in and out of sleep over his MacBook Pro to my left as vistas of scenic Yonkers speed by on my right. Yes, through the wonders of modern technology I am connected to the Internet and traveling to Boston at the same time. I really have no concept of the mechanism that makes this possible. Am I getting service via a cell phone signal? Is there some giant satellite dish on top of the bus (I checked as I was getting on but it could be in the middle, out of view. Buses are tall)? Regardless, this magical manifestation of modernity allows me to bore you with these observations:

The Bolt Bus stops at the corner of eighth avenue on thirty-fourth street. There's a plaque commissioned by the Ukrainian American Society on the building there which recognizes the location as the site of Nikola Tesla's death. I briefly wondered at the possibility of deliberate symbolism in deciding to have a giant red bus with a lightning bolt on the side stopping in front of Tesla's death place.

Hell's Kitchen seems like a sort of adorable neighborhood. After four years in New York I'd never seen it before today.

Initially none of the power outlets were working on the bus. This created a sort of mini-hysteria. The tensions ran so high that the bus driver pulled over at ninth avenue and fifty-first street to fix the problem. We had been moving for seven minutes and the repair took at least ten.

According to their website, Bolt Bus stops at 34th and 8th when going to Boston and Philly and 36th and 7th when going to DC. Wouldn't it make more sense to have the Philly and DC buses stopping in the same place on the West side with easy access to the Lincoln tunnel and have the Boston bus stop somewhere further east with easy access to the Tri-Borough bridge or at least FDR drive? It took us forty-five minutes to get out of Manhattan today.

I saw a giant beautiful rainbow ahead to the east as we turned on to 287. A prodigious sign, to be sure.

The dude in front of me is totally watching Reality Bites.

At five-thirty we passed the last exit in Norwalk, CT. This was two and a half hours into our supposedly four hour and fifteen minute trip. I might reach the end of the internet.

I uesd to not be able to sleep on any moving vehicle, but somehow in the last year or so the opposite has become true and I have started nodding off without even meaning to. I am worried that this is the first sign of an early-onset dementia. Also, since I unwittingly napped today, what if I'm not tired enough tonight to go to sleep early to wake up early tomorrow to go to sleep early tomorrow to wake up early on Saturday for the LSAT????? Seriously. I am not very good at sleeping.

In addition to mid-90's melodrama, the dude in front of me is assiduously tracking our progress forward on Google maps. He should clearly be traveling by plane.

This has essentially devolved into a Twitter. I'm going to go watch funny stuff on Hulu.

Tonight I was on the R train (taking the longest route home possible) and when passing through the Courtlandt Street subway station and I started to think about the newspapers on the platform and whether they were from seven years ago. And then I started to think about how that was seven years ago. And then I realized today is the four year anniversary of my move to New York City.

Right after that I thought about the perfect poem to describe that feeling of how the general history reminded me of my particular history and how it was all sort of uncertain and nostalgic. But I just spent about twenty minutes looking through Google for this poem and I don't think it exists after all. Which makes me wish I had a photographic memory so I would always be able to quote exactly what poem I was thinking of. Or maybe I should just write my own poems. Or go to bed.

Hover Car Solutions: Brooklyn, north and south

Because I work on Saturdays, Friday nights are my only chance to do weekend things with my normie, day-jobbing friends. For me Fridays are more like Thursdays, since I work the next day, but generally I try to go out and do social things. Tonight I am confronting the common problem of where to go. Since I moved to Park Slope in July I have had to negotiate the divide between northern and southern Brooklyn. As manifest by my move, I prefer the south. But Josh and many of my friends still reside up north. And so, I am faced with a forty-five minute G train trip before even eating dinner. Times like this make me question what all of this technology in our lives is really for. I mean, maybe I am going to press the "publish post" button in a few minutes and you, my world-wide friends, will be able to instantly soak in my words, but I will still languish on a rickety subway car for near to an hour to travel only five miles. I mean, I might as well take a stagecoach. Actually that would be faster.